The line, Non Scotus est Christe cui liber non placet iste (“Christ! He is not a Scot who is not pleased with this book!”), is literally the last word in the Corpus Christi College manuscript of Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, a working copy of his history of Scotland produced in the mid to late 1440’s. Bower’s (or his scribe’s) equation of narrative pleasure with national identity becomes a particularly vexed one in his narrative of the Battle of Bannockburn, a conflict that was simultaneously a decisive victory and a in which the very national identity Bower promotes could have been aborted. The existence of Bower’s working copy, along with D.E.R. Watt’s fine edition of the Scotichronicon, allows an unusually detailed—and fascinating—look into Bower’s editorial activity as he attempts to harness the power while avoiding the danger of what the Bannockburn conflict represents to his version of Scottish national identity. Within that narrative, the most problematic portion, for Bower, is a poem ostensibly written by Robert Baston, a captured English poet whom Edward II brought to compose verses on the English victory, forced by his captors to compose a poem on England’s defeat instead. The poem’s intense eyewitness account of the height of combat at Bannockburn, the moment in which Scottish identity itself was most thrown into question, becomes a rogue element in Bower’s history, as potentially dangerous as it is useful to Bower’s program. The evidence of Bower’s editorial process shows the lengths to which he goes to control his dangerous witness, emphasizing, through the framing and arrangement of the material, nationalist pleasure in the narrative of the captured poet. In so doing, this study demonstrates several ways in which evidence of medieval editorial activity can provide a not-often-credited window not only into the minds of medieval witnesses to combat, but also into the mind of the witness to the witnesses.